Quickly -

[kyburg]

A cover story from TIME magazine on the effects siblings have on personality development.

Huh.

Comments

[poetpaladin.livejournal.com]

Totally interesting article!

[technoshaman.livejournal.com]

Innnnnteresting. Particularly when one is deciding just how large one's family should be....

[vampireanneke.livejournal.com]

Nice article, but could have told you alot of that stuff. Then I had the evil sister.

[dracowayfarer.livejournal.com]

I'm just wondering why it took them so long to figure out the relevance of siblings on personality development.

[turandot.livejournal.com]

Blah. There's a school of psychological thought that considers birth order as lending a person certain characteristics, or else I wouldn't have read books about birth order and how it affects relationships with other people a couple of years prior to this article.

Time must have been having a pretty slow week, I suppose.

[turandot.livejournal.com]

I read a book called "The Birth Order: Why You Are the Way You Are" because I was bored, and it was somewhat illuminating, insofar as my husband and I deal with each other. We're both halves of an "older brother, younger sister" pair, and so we found that when we were stressed and would get on each other's nerves, it was usually one of us repeating the same patterns in which we dealt with our sibling. Not that my brother and my husband are anything alike, or for that matter I and his little sister: it's just that the pattern to our fights and misunderstandings were either somewhat very familiar (even when it came to things brother and sisters usually don't talk about), or borne out of expectations that the other partner would eventually behave a certain way. =P

[kyburg.livejournal.com]

I didn't have time to run through the entire article - but I didn't see anything on the only child immediately. Did they address them as not having the same experience with conflict resolution?

[turandot.livejournal.com]

Actually the article was sort of a disappointing pastiche for me: it only stated some stuff about siblings being able to work together better, but didn't mention a lot of stuff that most child psychologists commonly know.

To wit: yes, onlies do have a little more of a hard time with conflict resolution when first placed in a competitive setting, because they aren't used to having to share like siblings do (they eventually catch up enough, though). But you wouldn't know it from reading that article. =/

[kyburg.livejournal.com]

Psychobabble as entertainment. It's a real shame, ain't it.

[caitlin.livejournal.com]

I haven't read the article, but wonder what it would make of sibs that have a lot of age difference between them. Like, say, 16 years, 10 months, and about 14 days. *wry*

C.

[turandot.livejournal.com]

A 5 year difference among siblings makes both of them onlies. So in the case of a 5 and 10 year old, they're both onlies. Or say you have a 10, 8 and 1 year old: the two elders are older and younger sibling, the youngest is an only.

It's about how much undivided attention and resources you get in your first few years of life, and with a child who's in school (Kindergarden or above), the parents are able to focus on their newborn as if it was a first child (i.e., much as their first child was always their focus before that). Simple as that.